CAMBRIDGE & BIRMINGHAM, England — (BUSINESS WIRE) — March 15, 2014 —
The CUBESTORMER 3 robot which uses ARM® processor technology has smashed
the Guinness World Record title for solving a Rubiks® Cube, recording
a time of 3.253 seconds at the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham, UK, today.
It is the fastest-ever time set by a robot for the completion of a
Rubiks cube and the result of 18 months of effort by co-inventors David
Gilday and Mike Dobson who worked on the project in their spare time.

Image courtesy of ARM

The new record beats the existing time of 5.27 seconds set two years by
the same team. David Gilday is a principle engineer at ARM, the worlds
leading processor design company based in Cambridge, and co-inventor
Mike Dobson, a security systems engineer for Securi-Plex.

We knew CUBESTORMER 3 had the potential to beat the existing record but
with the robot performing physical operations quicker than the human eye
can see theres always an element of risk, said David Gilday. In the
end, the hours we spent perfecting the robot and ensuring its motor and
intelligence functions were properly synchronized paid off. Our big
challenge now is working out if its possible to make it go even faster.

The record-breaking robot employs intelligence from a Samsung Galaxy S4
smartphone powered by an Exynos 5 Octa application processor with an
eight-core ARM big.LITTLE implementation featuring four Cortex-A15 and
four Cortex-A7 processors. The phone analyzes the cube, calculates the
correct sequence of moves and instructs four robotic hands to do the
manipulations. ARM9 processors also power the eight LEGO® MINDSTORMS®
EV3 bricks which perform the motor sequencing and control.

David Gilday added:  The robot demonstrates just how fast a Samsung
Galaxy S4 can think. As well as working out the solution, the
ARM-powered Exynos processor has to instruct the robot to carry out the
moves. This is more complex than it seems because CUBESTORMER 3 uses a
speed cube which allows twists before the sides are fully-aligned. It
means the robot is effectively mirroring the same kind of judgement and
dexterity that a human speed cuber has to apply. 

Additional features include a precision independent braking system that
delivers significant speed benefits and software optimized to take
advantage of this increased mechanical flexibility and the compute power
gains.

Alongside the fastest robot to complete a Rubiks Cube attempt, David
Gilday also set two further world records with other ARM-based robots he
designed:

The quickest completion of a 4x4x4 cube using a MultiCuber 3 robot
based on a Huawei® Ascend P6 smartphone with a Hisilicon K3V2E
processor. Record set: 1 minute 18.68 seconds;

The largest Rubik's Cube solved by a robot, set with a 9x9x9 cube by a
MultiCuber 999 robot based on a Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone powered
by an Exynos 4 Quad application processor. The number of solution
possibilities ran to 278 digits and the robot recorded a time of 34
minutes 25.89 seconds.

ARM supports the Big Bang Fair as part of a series of planned
engagements aimed at encouraging young people to consider a career in a
science, technology, engineering or mathematics-based discipline. Our
stand in 2014 will feature experience-based activities giving visitors
the chance to program with Raspberry Pi, race robotic Sphero balls
through a 3D maze and program a real robot with Robotiky.

CUBESTORMER 3 and all of the other devices can be found throughout the
Big Bang Fair at ARMs stand in the Think Digital section  stand number
TD15.

Previous Guinness World Record set by CubeStormer II in November 2011.
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About ARM

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